Patrick Hoffman walks a fine line between social comment, gritty urban realism, satire and caper in his latest novel Friends Helping Friends. But by walking this line he manages to be informative, insightful and entertaining. Even the title is a sly dig at the various real and predatory and accidental relationships that power this novel.
When Friends Helping Friends opens Bunny Simpson is being arrested. It turns out that the crime Bunny committed was helping his friend Jerry beat up the ex-husband of lawyer Helen, who commissioned the deed while tweaked on the steroids that Jerry sells her. What the pair don’t know is that Helen’s ex-husband is a judge and soon they are facing serious jail time. But Bunny is thrown a lifeline by a pair of cops – they can get him out if he agrees to go undercover with a white supremist organisation that is run by his uncle. As that undercover operation goes on though, Bunny, and readers may start to suspect that nothing about this deal is what it seems.
Friends Helping Friends can be fairly dark. Hoffman takes readers into the US prison system and later into a training camp for white supremacists. But the darkness is leavened by the almost comical interactions of the characters and Hoffman’s side-eyed view of society. And there is no such thing as a truly good person in Bunny’s world, just shifting shades of grey. But there are webs of co-dependence and people doing favours for each other. So that when Jerry tries to lean on Helen to post bail for him, Helen enlists the help of gym buddy and casual hook-up Sam. It helps also that the narrative will occasionally skew in directions that readers do not expect but in ways that all build on that web of connections.
Overall, what Hoffman actually delivers a heist/caper novel in a Coen Brothers vein. And while its full shape does not come clear until later in the piece, the set up and progress of this central aspect of the plot keep the novel from descending into some potentially very dark places. While there are plenty of bizarre characters, this plot itself anchors around Bunny who, despite occasionally doing bad things and making bad decisions and possibly having a bit of a violent streak, is a character readers can cheer for.
Friends Helping Friends by Patrick Hoffman
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